Writing in her MediaPost Out to Launch column, Amy Corr highlights several new campaign launches, many auto-related. There the six and a half minute VW Jetta commercial with Joe Pantoliano and Kevin Connolly; the Jeep tie in with the movie, Sahara; Cars.com which is sponsoring ESPN's SportsCenter and the NFL Draft; and a Hispanic Honda campaign promoting the Ridgeline truck.

There's also a quirky "voicevertising" campaign in which Brooklyn resident Floyd Hayes auctioned off his voice on eBay and promised to shout a brand name every 15 minutes where ever he was. HALL's Fruit Breezers snapped up that bid and now Hayes can be heard all over New York barking out brand verbiage for HALL's.

Today, with the launch of Sony's PSP, do everything device, the company has launched its PSP website, created by LA-based Zugara. The site highlights the devices gaming, music, photo and video capabilities. A second site, also developed by Zugara, is a tutorial site replete with female talking head speaking in some modified version of valley speak. We really need a new name for this accent.

We know the Internet is rife with money making schemes but we didn't know they'd come in the form of a press release. The release, written by Jim Pryke and released through eMediaWire, is a thinly veiled pyramid marketing scheme. In the release, Pryke shares the tried and true methods of joining and building the pyramid structure though the use of referring URLs and press release distribution. While this program, very much like a chain letter, may build traffic, it's likely to be entirely untargeted, useless traffic used to simply to promote traffic to other useless, money-making scheme sites expanding faster than a McDonald's-powered pre-teen.

Rather than add more crap sites to the web with these lame, cheesy pyramid schemes, would it be asking too much for people to put a little energy into creating quality content that would draw useful traffic instead of traffic for traffic sake? We're not even linking to this piece of shit press release.

Sixty-three percent of marketers surveyed by The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) say they their company has participated in branded entertainment projects in the past year. The survey results of marketers' attitudes toward branded entertainment were presented during the ANA's annual Television Advertising Forum, held today at the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York.

An exclusive survey by the ANA of 118 senior marketers detailed their views on branded entertainment. A convergence of the advertising and entertainment industries, branded entertainment is more than just product placement, according to the ANA; it is the integration of a product within an appropriate context. Further analysis of the data concluded that forty-two percent of the marketers surveyed said that the top benefit of incorporating branded entertainment into their marketing mix is to make a stronger emotional connection with the consumer. This outranked the other benefits chosen by respondents by nearly double.

Ten tears after its grunge-like CK One campaign, Calvin Klein is relaunching the brand in April with a new television, outdoor and print ad campaign. The campaign will feature 40 mostly unknown models in a hip party scene in a building shaped like the CK One bottle. The campaign, designed by Fabien Baron and shot by David Sims, will continue with the "You're the One" tagline.

Either a joke or a simple error, Amazon has listed a Viewsonic monitor as a computer having a 10GB chip, 2,000 DIMM, a 30,000 GB hard drive and weighing 14 hundredths-pounds. All for $2,312.95. Certainly, there will be computers that powerful someday soon but not right now. One reviewer raved about the "product," writing, "This laptop is the bargain of the decade. 10.00GHZ of power.

I use one to currently calculate the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I even caught it calculating on how to make the perfect cup of tea. The speed that this laptop can move at is nothing short of outstanding. Shame it doesn't have legs though."

Sure to be removed from the site at some point, here's a screenshot for posterity's sake.

Park Ridge, Illinois resident and father to two grammer school children, Dominic Vecchio, placed an ad in last Thursday's Park Ridge Herald-Advocate claiming the his Maine Township High School District is a regular trading ground to heroin and crystal meth. Unsurprisingly, the ad has caused a stir and raised the ire of school district officials who deny Vecchio's claims.

"We've never had any incident that suggests that heroin or meth is being sold or distributed in our hallways," said Principal David Claypool. "It's just an unfair accusation." The kids thinks Vecchio is stretching it a bit too. Senior John Mallory said,"It was irresponsible. About 99 percent of the school doesn't do heroin or crystal meth; it's a tiny pocket, and the deans and administration are doing a good job trying to combat it."

Vecchio said he met with children in the town who told him drugs were on sale at school and, perhaps in reaction to a friend's 15 year old son dying of a heroin overdose last fall, Vecchio decided to spend $900 of his own money to place the ad and raise awareness of the issue.

Not new, as AdJab points out but since we go weak in the knees for Lost's Evangeline Lilly, we just thought we'd dream a little dream for a minute or two as we write and tell you she's the face of telephone chat service LiveLinks.

Great score for LiveLinks. We do wonder though if, with her new found fame, she regrets associating herself with a service for shut ins with no social life. OK, that's harsh. Everyone lives a different lifestyle but still. Alright, we're done with our Evangeline Lilly moment.

Acknowledging the forgone conclusion that, just like sexual abstinence, there's not much a parent or minister can do to stop kids from playing Halo 2, several churches are embracing the games as a channel through which to teach gospel. Director of Equipping of Dare 2 Share Ministries International Lane Palmer explains, "The point is that almost everyone already has run out and played it, so we think this is an awesome opportunity to take something hugely popular in our culture and turn it into a way to share the most important message. What we need are people who approach their Christianity with the same passion and concentration as they do with video games."

Palmer likens the story line of Halo 2 to that of the Bible, "Don't you just hate it when a bunch of outer space freaks get together and decide it's their mission to torch humanity? ...the Halo storyline is remarkably like a major theme of the Bible."

"God created people in a perfect world in a perfect relationship with Him, which made Satan and his angels very jealous. So since the beginning of time, they have been on a mission to destroy all humans.

Here's what Jesus said - 'A thief (Satan) is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of' (John 10:10). Jesus came to this planet to save the planet from a group much worse than the Covenant and from a fate much worse than physical death."

Comedians Wanda Sykes and Adal Ramones are featured in a new, national radio campaign for Greyhound Lines, Inc. aimed at urban and Hispanic markets. Already running in the Pacific Northwest area, the campaign is slated to launch in the Southwest in April.